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Dōgen is among the few authors from historic Japan who have received substantial attention in modern philosophical discourse. His thought on time figures prominently in this regard. Association between Uji 有時 , the title of his short instruction on the subject, and Heidegger's Being and Time has facilitated this integration into modern philosophical discourse. It is customary in this discourse to treat Dōgen's writings as philosophical texts. Against this tendency, I apply the concept of 'frames of equivalence' from translation studies and demonstrate how the philosophical mode of reading leads to substantial shifts in all three dimensions of the semiotic process. In the pragmatic dimension, the religious impetus of Dōgen's texts is toned down to an appeal in favor of certain epistemological and ontological commitments. In the syntactic dimension, the formal organization of his texts is ignored, obfuscating the overall structure and intent of his argument. Given the context-dependency of meaning, this leads to significant shifts in the semantic dimension as well. I argue that paying attention to frames of equivalence in reading Dōgen serves to identify creative investments and inadvertent projections. This prepares the ground for historically more accurate interpretations and prevents the misappropriation of 'enlightened' authority for philosophical hypothesizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I discuss the various ways time can be inscribed in texts below the level of explicit propositions about time. I argue that a full chronographical analysis needs to account for the dimensions of the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic. Taking Kant's table of categories as a guide to the fundamental functions of chronographic determination, I propose a methodology of analysis that goes beyond the aspect of quantitative measurement, and includes typological, thetic and modal information about time. Numerous examples from various textual domains such as poetry, historiography, science and law illustrate the wide applicability of the proposed analytical categories. The full matrix of dimensions and determinative functions can be used to describe the chronographic signature of a text, which depends as much on its communicative purpose as on the technologies of calculating and describing time available to its authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the concept of religion, and specifically its application to non-Western historic cultural formations has come unter critical scrutiny. This paper proposes the study of semantic fields as a method to explore the self-understanding of historic formations of what, in modern parlance, counts as religion, and thus, as a testing strategy for the concept of religion that is employed in scholarly analysis. It uses the said method to analyse three works by the medieval Japanese Buddhist monk Dōgen (1200–1253), who came to be revered as founder of the still extant Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. By putting his notion of the 'Buddha Way' (butsudō) into strong relief, it provides a basis for comparison with modern concepts of religion. The conclusion is that Dōgen's ideas conform to a surprisingly large extent with modern ideas. This may be one reason for his popularity in modern times. But Dōgen should not be taken to represent the general world-view of medieval Japan. Further comparative analyses of other corpora remain necessary to gauge the applicability of 'religion' as a category for the analysis of medieval Japanese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various attempts have been made to systematize fundamental patterns of temporal organization and to establish links between these patterns and natural and cultural evolution. This paper compares three pertinent theories of time in the light of evidence from Japanese cultural history: the hierarchical theory of time by J. T. Fraser, the fourfold paradigm of time imageries by Y. Maki, and the social learning theory of time by G. Dux. It demonstrates that the "canonical forms of time" established by these authors can be brought into meaningful conversation with each other and that they suggest helpful methodologies for the analysis of temporal perspectives in Japanese history. At the same time, comparative analysis reveals reasons for caution against simplified evolutionary accounts of cultural history. From very early on, Japanese literary sources evince an acute consciousness of conflicting temporalities. At the same time, there is no unified "Japanese concept of time"--neither trans-historically nor at any given period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict is both a creative force in the establishment and a necessary condition for the sustenance of all higher modes of being. This, in short, I find to be one of the most ground-breaking insights of J. T. Fraser’s theory of “Time as a Hierarchy of Creative Conflicts.” As a consequence of this insight, I argue that to understand, with Fraser, the constitutive and creative function of some kinds of conflict will help us to accept, and even embrace, conflict not merely as a perpetual fact, as suggested by Stuart Hampshire, but as a necessary condition that makes possible whatever is of specific value in human culture. I go on to propose to distinguish between accidental and constitutive conflicts, and show how assessing conflicts accordingly can help to better manage them and avoid some destructive paths of action. The paper closes with some reflections on the limitations of the insight and its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From their respective beginnings 54 and 20 years ago, the International Society for the Study of Time and its journal, I KronoScope i , have explored time's many shapes and aspects. XVII of the I Study of Time i series, edited by Paul Harris, Arkadiusz Misztal, and I KronoScope i 's previous Chief Editor, Jo Alyson Parker. In this issue of I KronoScope i , the introductory essay by Fred Turner explores how metered poetry employs a fundamental feature of time by accentuating its measure through conscious variation. [Extracted from the article]